Skip to main content

What I Did on my Spring Vacation -- Day 5, Thursday, and Day 6, Friday

Note:  Sorry I didn't update this sooner.  Boring Personal Shit intervened.

Thursday was our free day.  We didn't really have a plan for what to do, we weren't doing anything at Disney, and we weren't leaving until Friday morning.  So Jean and I went hunting for breakfast while Ryan snoozed.  Jean found a place on Yelp that was nearby and got reasonably good reviews, so we set off and found it relatively easily.

I'll just say, if that's a 4-star breakfast place, then Southern California has really low standards for breakfast.

We then went wandering, first to The Pleasure Chest, where apparently Ryan once worked.  While there, I made a complete and utter ass of myself to Sex Nerd Sandra, who is a podcaster and my hero and I felt awful about slobbering all over her (virtually; I managed to avoid bodily fluids in reality).

From there, we went to In-N-Out again for lunch, and I once again ate more than I really should have, ordering off-menu and enjoying my final taste of heaven in burger form for the trip.  We toured around LA for a while, Ryan playing tour guide and telling us about the experience of living in LA when he was younger.  It made me want to hug him, and run very very fast in the Northern direction.

For dinner, we stopped at a grocery store for liquor, hit up a truly fabulous Mexican restaurant, and then retired to the room to booze it up, play with our lightsabers, and get to sleep early for our flight the next day.

A note on Mexican food:  I had not realized just how much I missed good Mexican, which you really can't get in Portland, until we ate at this little hole-in-the-wall place.  Once again, thanks to Yelp and customer reviews, we ate somewhere I wouldn't normally look twice at, and had a fabulous meal for a really reasonable amount.

We woke up early on Friday, and Jean and I went back to the Mexican place to get breakfast while Ryan ate his leftovers.  Then we packed up our stuff, made sure the room was empty of our things, checked out, and Ryan took us to the airport.  At LGB, it turns out there is an inside to the place, which was the TSA area and the check-in gates.  Getting into the airport was as easy as getting out of it, and we said goodbye to Ryan and boarded our plane back to PDX, me hopped up on muscle-relaxants to keep my back from seizing up in the airplane seats.  Two hours later, we were on the ground and a 20 minute train ride had us home and relaxing in time for an afternoon nap.

All together, it was a magnificent trip, and I'd love to do it again sometime, perhaps even next year.  Our fellow travelers were wonderful, and I found out that traveling with Jean makes me calm, a more effective mood-stabilizer than Xanax or Valium.

A note on drugs:  don't do them, kids!  (totally do them, kids).

So that's my vacation!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Organizing And You: Lessons from Labor History

    I made a joke on Twitter a while ago: Do I need to post the Thomas M Comeau Organizing Principles again? https://t.co/QQIrJ9Sd3i — Jerome Comeau says Defund The Police (@Heronymus) July 15, 2021 and it recently came back up because a member of my family got their first union job and was like "every job should be offering these sorts of benefits" and so I went ahead and wrote down what I remember of what my dad told me. My father had many jobs, but his profession was basically a labor union organizer, and he talked a lot about the bedrock foundation items needed to be serious about organizing collective action. Here's what I remember.    The Thomas M. Comeau Principles of Organizing -- a fundamental list for finding and building worker solidarity from 50 years of Union Involvement. This list is not ranked; all of the principles stated herein are coequal in their importance. Numbering is a rhetorical choice, not a valuation. 1) Be good at your job. Even in an at-will

Money and Happiness as a fungible resource

Money really does buy happiness. Anyone who tells you differently has a vested interest in keeping you poor, unhappy, or both. I know this because I grew up on the ragged edge of poor, and then backed my way into a career in IT, which is where the modern world keeps all the money that isn't in Finance. So I am one of the extreme minority of Generation X that actually had an adulthood that was markedly more financially stable than my parents. And let me tell you: money really does buy happiness. To be clear: at 45 years old, I'm now in a relationship and a period of my life where our household is effectively double-income, no kids. I live in the city, but I own a house, and can only afford to do that because of our combined income. We also have two cars -- one new, one used (though neither of them is getting driven very much these days) -- and we have a small discretionary budget every month for things like videogames, books, and the like. What my brother used to call DAM -- Dic

Activision, Blizzard, Game development, IT, and my personal role in all of that.

 I'm pretty sure if you spend any sort of time at all on Twitter and/or spend any sort of time playing videogames, you are by now at least aware of the lawsuit brought forth by the State of California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing versus Activision Blizzard, Inc., et al. From this point on, I'll add a Content Warning for folks who are sensitive about sexual assault, suicide, and discrimination based on sex, gender, and skin color, as well as crude humor around and about sexual assault , and what the State of California refers to as "a pervasive 'frat boy' culture" around Act/Bliz, especially in the World of Warcraft-associated departments.   Just reading the complaint is hard rowing, even with the clinical legalese in place. The complaint itself is relatively short; 29 pages laying out ten Causes of Action (basically, "these are the legs on which our lawsuit stands"). I'm not sure I have the vocabulary to properly express how a